Posted on 01/27/2007 4:40:50 PM PST by balch3
One of my favorite early Steve Martin routines went something like this: "Would you like to make a million dollars and pay no taxes? OK. First, make a million dollars. Now, just don't pay any taxes; and if somebody from the IRS asks you about it, just say 'I forgot!'"
Nonsense? Sure. But funny, especially as Steve delivered it? You bet.
But there's some absurd nonsense, not especially funny, being taught our school kids every day, in almost every school in America.
Darwin's theory of evolution.
(Column continues below)
"But it's science," you say. No, not really. Certainly, not yet, if it ever will be. It's a theory, an extremely farfetched, unproven theory and at its base, its fundamental core terribly unscientific!
To me (and I'll explain, so stay with me) this theory is exactly like Steve Martin's joke. It starts with a wish, a desire, proceeds through a ludicrous construction or process, and leads to a preposterous conclusion.
But this unfunny joke has been taken very seriously by a host of scientists, and now most educators, and it has been universally accepted as "fact" by most universities and school systems. And woe to the teacher, from grade school through college, who dares to question this improbable, unproven theory. If he or she dares to suggest or present the alternative theory of Intelligent Design the vastly more plausible notion that this incredible universe and all living things point logically to a Creator with an intelligence far beyond our feeble comprehension (no matter how many Ph.D. degrees we might have among us) lawsuits and intimidation will surely follow that teacher.
In one of his many excellent and substantive mailings, D. James Kennedy drew my attention to Tom DeRosa, who grew up Catholic in Brooklyn and spent his high-school years at a Catholic seminary. He was voted "Best Seminarian" in 1964, but one year later, instead of taking vows to enter the priesthood, he became an atheist.
His encounter with Darwin in college led to that decision. "There was a point where I became so rebellious that I yelled out, 'No God!' I remember saying, 'I'm free, I'm liberated,'" DeRosa recalled. "I can do what I want to do; man is in charge! It was pure, exhilarating rebellion!"
That rebellion soured after a while, and after 13 years as a respected public-school science teacher, he experienced a spiritual awakening that completely changed his perception of existence and science. He's now founder and president of the Creation Studies Institute and author of "Evidence for Creation: Intelligent Answers for Open Minds."
Did his IQ leak out his ears? Did he cease being a scientist? Far from it; he became a real scientist, an honest seeker after truth who could look at facts without a predisposed belief and actually see the obvious all around us.
As a real scientist, he looked again at what he'd gullibly accepted in college. And, examining the prevalent claim that life "evolved" from molecule to man by a series of biological baby steps, tiny mutations over millions of years, he realized there is no historical evidence for that claim. He writes, "Millions upon millions of fossils have been collected to date, but there is no evidence of transition fossils, that is, fossils of organisms in an intermediate stage of development between steps on the evolutionary ladder."
Had you thought about that? If all life on this planet were actually in a process of "evolution," would every species evolve in lock step, regardless of different environments? Or wouldn't there be all the intermediate steps still in evidence, at various places around the globe? Wouldn't there be plenty of evolving apes, tending toward homo sapiens, in the jungles and rain forests, possibly developing verbal skills and capable of elementary math and reasoning?
None such. Ever. Nada. Apes have always been apes, and humans always human (though some of us less so than others).
I wonder if any science teachers today ever share with their students that Charles Darwin acknowledged "the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity." If the originator of the theory of evolution and the author of "The Origin of Species" (the book which later students eagerly used as an excuse to leave a Creator out of the picture) couldn't imagine everything we see and know happening without some design and purpose why should any of us?
Why indeed?
Could it be that this whole evolution idea has grown out of a deep desire to escape the implications that necessarily accompany the concept of an infinite Intelligence, a Creator? If humans want to prove some theory, no matter how farfetched and self-serving, they will inevitably find some "evidence" that they can wedge into their theory.
Some years ago, Johnny Carson had a lady on his "Tonight Show" who had a large collection of potato chips, each of which she said resembled some famous person. And if you looked at the chip from a certain angle, and maybe squinted just right, you could see what she was referring to. While she bent down to carefully select another chip, Johnny removed one she said looked like George Washington, and replaced it with one he had under his desk. Then, when she had straightened up, he "absentmindedly" picked up the substituted chip and put it in his mouth, crunching loudly. The horror on her face was a huge laugh for the audience, and Johnny quickly relieved her, handing back the George Washington potato chip, intact.
This decades-long scavenger hunt, in which intelligent and educated seekers keep digging up artifacts to "prove" an unprovable and patently unscientific concept, is very much like the potato chip lady on "The Tonight Show": You see what you want to see. Whether it's there or not.
I'm grateful to Joseph Farah and the editors here at WND for letting me take this space each week. This topic, I feel, is so important and I've got so much to say about it that I'll pick up here, in this space, next week. I hope you'll stop by.
Related special offers:
"The Case Against Darwin"
"Tornado in A Junkyard: The Relentless Myth of Darwinism"
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And now that you're here they have a bandleader.
People see what they want to see in rocks.
And people, for religious reasons, can't see what they don't want to see in rocks.
Why don't you let scientists figure out what specimens are transitionals and what specimens are not. At least they have the qualifications to do so.
For your edification, here is a transitional. Note its position in the chart which follows (hint--in the upper center):
Site: Koobi Fora (Upper KBS tuff, area 104), Lake Turkana, Kenya (4, 1)
Discovered By: B. Ngeneo, 1975 (1)
Estimated Age of Fossil: 1.75 mya * determined by Stratigraphic, faunal, paleomagnetic & radiometric data (1, 4)
Species Name: Homo ergaster (1, 7, 8), Homo erectus (3, 4, 7), Homo erectus ergaster (25)
Gender: Female (species presumed to be sexually dimorphic) (1, 8)
Cranial Capacity: 850 cc (1, 3, 4)
Information: Tools found in same layer (8, 9). Found with KNM-ER 406 A. boisei (effectively eliminating single species hypothesis) (1)
Interpretation: Adult (based on cranial sutures, molar eruption and dental wear) (1)
See original source for notes:
Source: http://www.mos.org/evolution/fossils/fossilview.php?fid=33
Source: http://wwwrses.anu.edu.au/environment/eePages/eeDating/HumanEvol_info.html
Wow, you thought of that all by yourself?
Hint: Jokes are funnier when they are original, and you don't just piggyback on someone else's.
Good chance.
There is no question that Biology and perhaps moreso Microbiology are great indicators of a rather deep relationship between all life forms on the planet.
The notion that all of these diverse life forms came about as a result of randomness in the physical universe is rather an uninviting concept for any seriously thinking person, IMHO!
Never the less, that is the sort of nonsense that we and our children are being spoon fed by the brilliant minds of Academia.
In a nutshell, something had to come from nothing if the Intelligentsia have it right.
Of course, some might argue that God came from nothing, but that is circuitous reasoning.
Any attempt to use that silly, spurious reasoning does in the end prove exactly nothing less than the best thing to do is to just continue arguing or let it all go, or accept the "substance of things hoped for, evidence not seen" as a way of life.
The rest can worship or fear Thanatos, as they will.
Creation Archive > Volume 14 Issue 4 > Those fossils are a problem
First published:
Creation 14(4):4445
September 1992
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Those fossils are a problem
Dr David Pilbeam, of the Boston Natural History Museum, has considerable expertise in palaeoanthropology (the study of fossil man). He came to the attention of the scientific community as being an objective scientist when he wrote an article for Human Nature magazine, June 1978, entitled, Rearranging Our Family Tree.
In that article he reported that discoveries since 1976 had shaken his view of human origins and forced a change in ideas of mans early ancestors. Dr Pilbeams previous views were wrong about tool use replacing canine teeth, evidence for which was totally lacking. He did not believe any longer that he was likely to hit upon the true or correct story of the origin of man. He repeated a number of times that our theories have clearly reflected our current ideologies instead of the actual data. Too often they have reflected only what we expected of them.
In an interview with Luther Sunderland, Dr Pilbeam elaborated on the subjects he had discussed in his 1978 article. Currently, he was teaching a course that covered primates and was also doing field research in Africa and Pakistan. He was advising the Kenya Government on the establishment of an international institute for the study of human origins. His office was near those of anthropologists Richard Leakey and his mother, Dr Mary Leakey, in Nairobi, Kenya. He referred to several more recent publications, a review article in Annual Reviews of Anthropology, and several on his work in Pakistan.
Why had he changed his position on human origins?
He said it was not due to the discovery of only one particular specimen, but the recovery of various materials made him realize that his previous statements, which had been made so adamantly, were really based on very little evidence. Because they were based on so little evidence, he began to wonder why he had held them so strongly. It made him think about the nature of scientific thinking, and this precipitated a very profound change in his approach to analysing data. He said that many of the statements made in the field of human origins had very little to do with the real data and a great deal to do with unstated assumptions. He thought this was true not only of his field but, Much of what is said in other areas, I think, is also highly speculative.
Dr Pilbeam said there were two ways to look at evolutionary theory: the punctuated way and the gradual way. Before the punctuated equilibria theory came along, scientists said emphatically there was only one way. Dr Pilbeam thought it would be very difficult to tell for most mammal groups which alternative was correct, but he thought that some people who disagreed with punctuated equilibria theory did so on philosophical rather than empirical grounds. He emphasized that this was why he had made such a point in his 1978 article that ones preconceived notions shape the way one perceives data.
Dr Colin Patterson, a senior palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, agreed about the lack of fossil evidence connecting man with a lower primate. In answer to the question, What do you think of the australopithecines as mans ancestors?, Dr Patterson replied, There is no way of knowing whether they are the ancestors to anything or not. The above was largely quoted from Luther Sunderlands book, Darwins Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems. This book takes a refreshingly different line from other creationist books on the fossil problem.
Sunderland formally, and in detail, interviewed five leading fossil experts from the worlds major fossil museums. Face to face in a formal scientific discussion, they not only confirm, but also enhance, what creation scientists such as Dr Duane Gish have been saying all along. Sunderland relentlessly takes the reader on an excursion with the experts to every single major transitionthe net result is devastating. Australian anti-creationist palaeontologist Michael Archer is still insisting that evolutionary transition is adequately documented in the fossils. The best of the best in the evolutionary fossil camp claim otherwise, in their own words.
Are there any transitional fossils?
None of the five museum officials whom Luther Sunderland interviewed could offer a single example of a transitional series of fossilized organisms that would document the transformation of one basically different type to another.
Dr Eldredge [curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the American Museum] said that the categories of families and above could not be connected, while Dr Raup [curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago] said that a dozen or so large groups could not be connected with each other. But Dr Patterson [a senior palaeontologist and editor of a prestigious journal at the British Museum of Natural History] spoke most freely about the absence of transitional forms.
Before interviewing Dr Patterson, the author read his book, Evolution, which he had written for the British Museum of Natural History. In it he had solicited comments from readers about the books contents. One reader wrote a letter to Dr Patterson asking why he did not put a single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book. On April 10, 1979, he replied to the author in a most candid letter as follows:
I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?
I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwins authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived. I will lay it on the linethere is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test.
So, much as I should like to oblige you by jumping to the defence of gradualism, and fleshing out the transitions between the major types of animals and plants, I find myself a bit short of the intellectual justification necessary for the job
Reference
* Patterson, personal communication; documented in: Luther Sunderland, Darwins Enigma, Master Books, El Cajon, CA, pp. 8890, 1988.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v14/i4/fossils.asp
I'm making this long post because you seem reasonable, and I think sincere--somewhat rare in those who defend evolution.
I did not "acquire the notion that evolutionary theory is about origins. After all, it all derives from a book named "Origin of the Species," in case you have forgotten. If creation is denied (which it is by me) and life has a beginning, (which is doubted by me) whatever else the evolutionist is interested in, he must assume that life originated somewhere, somehow, and however much he'd like to avoid the subject, the origin of life is central to the whole quesion of evolution.
Quickly I'll address some points you made:
1) mass extinctions of species (more species have lived and perished than currently exist)
Extremely doubtufl, and at least unproveable.
2) embryonic development in higher life forms exhibits stages in which archaic, biologically useless characteristics manifest, such as tails and gill slits in human embryoes.
This is very old and almost universally repudiated.
3) Parallel evolution, as with crocodiles and alligators, two distict species that are nevertheless remarkable similar and well-adapted to survive in similar environments. Or were those Florida alligators here all along, BEFORE the land subsided into the Carribean Ocean, just waiting (out in the desert or in the forests?) for the ideal environment to evolve? How did they survive in the meantime?
Interesting question, "how did they survive." It is interesting because those who reject the creation story (or deluvian story of Noah and two of each species) are quite right in observing, if there are only two of a breeding species that odds against survival are zero to none. Yet, if evolution is right, each new species had to begin with at least one new breeding pair. Since the only known way a new species could develop is by mutation, that would mean the exact same mutation would have to occur in at least two offspring of some creature to make breeding of the new specie possible at all, and for survival, would require a larger number of breeding pairs, all with the same genetic characteristics produced by mutation at approximately the same time. Since there are millions of species, this event would have had to happen millions of times.
In all of recorded history there is not one example of a mutation that has produced a new specie, and, with the exception of some extremely doubtful cases, there has never ever been one mutation of any creature that was beneficial.
Now, with apologies for it's length, I'm going to provide a very long argument against evolution by a micro-biologist who is neither a creationist or "intelligent-designist" but simply recognizes that evolution is nothing more than a very unsubstantiated hypothesis that is interesting, and may ultimately be valid but is a long long way from being established and has no basis for being taught as science at all.
I consider it as an analogy to Zeno's paradox. :-)
Cheers!
You opined, "Unless you happen upon God creating species." Since you have such a short view of space and time, the evidence of DNA and the resulting animal by animal results seem to you to be randomized. With a longer view you might actually 'see God' in the creation.
"Newton codified our intuition of absolute space and absolute time as Axioms, and derived his results as theorems from this and other "Axioms, or Laws" of motion.
Einstein exploded the entire axiomatic basis of Newtonian Mechanics, and this was the reason he caused such a sensation."
What? Einstein did not use the terms acceleration, velocity, position? Take away those concepts and there is no physics, either Newtonian or that of Einstein. They are not "axioms" in any sense, not assumptions, and certainly not "intuitions." If they were, why did Galileo have to disprove the intuition that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones.
If Einstein "exploded" Newtonian Mechanics, why is it necessary to first study Newtonian Mechanics before general and special relativity can be understood. What you are saying is essentially the same as saying multiplication "explodes" addition.
Good grief!
Hank
Please re-read the sentence as posted:
"evolution is a tool of the left, used to destroy the notion that our rights don't come from a creator and are inalienable"
The poster did not say the evolution had beed *devised* for that purpose, but that it has been seized upon or wielded by some Marxists and their ilk.
To some extent, that is true; much as post #2 in this thread says that many of the sexual scandals in the Catholic Church (as well as, say, liberation theology) were part of a deliberate effort by Marxists to subvert the influence of the papacy worldwide.
But that is a separate issue from the evidence for and against; just as the presence of Al Gore in the debate is not disposative of the discussion of global warming.
Cheers!
You forgot gambling over the internet.
They are apologists, willing to twist any scientific fact or theory as needed to match their religious belief.
Just in the first paragraph of the article you cited it states, "He came to the attention of the scientific community as being an objective scientist when he wrote an article for Human Nature magazine, June 1978, entitled, Rearranging Our Family Tree."
When I took my first Human Evolution course in 1974, Pilbeam's textbook, The Evolution of Man was the main textbook. It was first published in 1970. At that time he was already a well-established evolutionary scientist; that is well before the June 1978 article cited by the answersingenesis.com article as when "he came to the attention of the scientific community as being an objective scientist."
The rest of the article is ingenious in its mendacity. It implies that Pilbeam has turned from evolution to creation "science" when that is an outright fabrication. It implies that a number of other evolutionary paleoanthropologists don't believe there are any transitionals. That is outright falsehood based on the creationist art of quotemining.
Is it any wonder that those of us trained in science only laugh at the lengths the creationist websites will go to in order to push their anti-science message?
Is it any wonder that so many folks who don't know the scientific data fall for this claptrap in the guise of science, and post it from website to website in the hope that repetition, no matter how inaccurate, will prevail over scientific research?
How does one define a transitional...strictly speaking?
Here's the question--not flame bait, but I just plain old haven't ever seen it spelled out.
I am approaching the question by considering the definition of a species as "animals genetically similar enough that they can mate and produce fertile offspring" -- leaving aside plants and unicellular critters for the moment. :-)
Are there any hard-and-fast rules governing the demarcation line between species, when the process of transition between old species "A" and new species "B" takes place over, say, a dozen generations?
Say species A could have mated effectively with successive generations 1-4.
Generation 4 could have mated in turn with species A, generations 1-4, and down to generation 6.
Generation 6 could have mated with generation 4 through generation 8.
Generation 8 could have mated with members of generations 6 through 10.
Generation 10 could have mated with anyone from generation 8-12 and produced offspring.
And in the midst of these changs there are accompanying physical differences, say, size of the beak (hat tip to finches, don't you know), or hardness of the pecker ;-)
Is the going approach to wave one's hands and say "the distinction is for practical purposes immaterial, since we *know* that species A is different from species B 12 generations later"?
Or is an attempt made (when possible) to correlate DNA changes in the different generations?
Yes, I realize 12 generations might not be a good example, nor necessarily representative.
But it is a small enough cohort that one can phrase the question in a more or less succinct form.
Oh, and one other question...
When one says that the members of the two species cannot mate...
does it matter what is the efficient cause of the copulative dissonance ;-)
E.g. Great Dane and a Shih Tzu. Either the male is too small to mount the female, or (going the other way) peg A won't fit in slot B.
Or, is there required to be a mismatch in the chromosomes such that fertilization does not succeed?
...and if the latter, has anyone studied the correlation between cladistics and the fertilization process in detail?
Cheers!
False.
Ideas (I presume you mean formulations of scientific hypotheses and theories) are not arrived at in high schools. They are formulated in technical journals and other interactions among established scientists.
High schools are near the bottom of the food chain--they are consumers, not originators, of scientific thought. High school students, and most high school teachers, are simply not equipped to evaluate a "competition of ideas." They fall short by several years to decades of intensive study.
So close :-)
This fails to make the distinction between the humanities and the "hard sciences" -- there may be inherent limitiations in one's ability to *control* the conditions; or there may be classes of experience or phenomena (social interactions) which can be demonstrated, but not *conclusively* -- see also the legal phrase "beyond a reasonable doubt".
In other words, there may be things which are true, or false, but for which science is not a suitable instrument to discern the difference in practical use.
Cheers!
it may or may not be part of the globalist-atheistic agenda, but it advances their cause by contributing to the breakdown of society.
Please define your terms more carefully.
By "all of recorded history" do you mean "during the time of written records"?
By"not one example" do you mean directly observed 'as it was happening' as opposed to "inferred from indirect evidence"?
What do you mean by "specie" ...?
As far as beneficial, have you considered The Nylon Bug?
Cheers! Cheers!
The problem is that many scientific ideas use very specialized terminology and notation; such notation (and even the concepts) being not only obscure, but "counter-intuitive".
So in an attempt to translate the concepts into lay language, many of the essentials are shunted aside or simply morph into something "neither fish, nor fowl".
Try explaining (for example) Hartree-Fock theory, or expansion of a function in a known basis, then translating to another basis set.
Most undergrads (if they follow at all) will immediately jump at the wrong conclusions, and consider each new term as a specific correction or modeling a discrete feature--the concept of numerical convergence just isn't something they are familiar with.
Cheers!
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